Fluid and particulate transport processes underlie a huge variety of applications spanning industrial, biomedical, and environmental problems. At the University of Vermont, we have research spanning a wide range of fluid transport interests, such as plasma physics of aircraft atmospheric reentry, biomedical processes involving blood and synovial flow, bacterial growth and mitigation processes, snowpack monitoring and melt modeling, groundwater flows and how they are impacted by thermal energy storage and hydraulic fracking, nanoparticle synthesis and interaction in magnetic fields, just to name a few. Our faculty working in this area encompasses experts from a variety of backgrounds, including Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering, and Mathematics and Statistics.
Core Faculty
Arne Bomblies, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Bomblies works at the intersection of climate and society and seeks to understand how a changing climate will affect human and natural systems. Specifically, his research spans climatic and hydrologic impacts on malaria transmission, the impacts of changing extreme climatic events, and climate-to-flood mechanistic linkages. This involves fieldwork in places such as Niger, Ethiopia, and Madagascar for the malaria work, as well as climate and hydrological modeling with an emphasis on extreme events in the northeastern US.
Yves Dubief, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Dubief has been developing and collaborating research programs in turbulence control by complex fluids, flow-surface interactions with application to erosion and ablation by turbulent flows, biophysics of blood coagulation under flow, and lubrication in articular joints. Dr. Dubief is a fellow of the Vermont Advanced Computing Center. He contributes to the teaching of fluid-related and computing-related undergraduate and graduate courses.
Douglas Fletcher, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Fletcher is a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Vermont with a secondary appointment in Materials Science. In 2009, Dr. Fletcher and his graduate students completed the construction of the UVM 30 kW Inductively Coupled Plasma Torch Facility that integrated optical diagnostics with the plasma test chamber. This facility has been used to screen a wide variety of candidate thermal protection materials, from solid ceramics to woven fibers.
Jeffrey Marshall, Mechanical Engineering
Dr. Marshall is a Professor and Associate Dean of Research in CEMS at the University of Vermont. He performed research in fluid mechanics and particulate flows, with a focus on vortex flows and adhesive particulate flows. His recent projects involve nanoparticle diffusion, biofilm simulation, renewable energy systems, turbulent particle agglomeration, obscurant cloud dynamics, particle transport in gas turbine engines, and cold-regions sensor systems.
George Pinder, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Pinder has mentored hundreds of students and authored or co-authored more than 250 papers and 16 book chapters. He was the founding editor of Advances in Water Resources and Numerical Methods for Partial Differential Equations and has received numerous prestigious recognitions including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Environmental and Water Resources in 2016. He was elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2010.
Donna Rizzo, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Rizzo's research focuses on the development of new computational tools to improve the understanding of human-induced changes in natural systems and the way we make decisions about natural resources. Since joining UVM in the fall of 2002, she has worked on several computational approaches to multi-scale environmental problems.
Affiliated Research
Amber Doiron, Electrical and Biomedical Engineering
Dr. Doiron's research focuses on the development of nanoparticles for use in drug delivery and as contrast agents in magnetic resonance imaging in addition to studying toxicity mechanisms of nanoparticles. Applications of her work focus on the detection and treatment of atherosclerosis, biofilm infections, cancer, and corneal keratitis.
Appala Raju Badireddy, Civil and Environmental Engineering
Dr. Badireddy conducts interdisciplinary research on (1) sustainable membrane processes with a focus on water & wastewater treatment, and resource recovery, (2) environmental nanotechnology with a focus on applications and implications of engineered nanomaterials, and (3) nanometrology with a focus on developing enhanced darkfield-hyperspectral imaging (ED-HSI) microscopy methods for detection and quantification of engineered nanomaterials and co-contaminants in environmental and biological matrices.
Jianke Yang, Mathematics and Statistics
Dr. Yang is the Williams Professor of Mathematics, University Distinguished Professor, University Scholar, and Chairperson in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Vermont. Dr. Yang's research focuses on nonlinear waves (nonlinear PDEs) and their physical applications. This research has direct applications to fiber telecommunication systems, nonlinear optics, and oceanography.
Jun Yu, Mathematics and Statistics
Dr. Yu's research is in applied mathematics involving mathematical modeling and analysis of practical applications governed by differential equations. In particular, asymptotic and numerical analyses of dynamics in combustion models with diffusion partial differential equations have recently carried out. The techniques developed in these studies are useful for transport processes in general.
Affiliated Centers
